A member of the UNJPPI coordinating team spent April 2025 in occupied Palestine. This is his report.

Excerpts:

… Israeli settler colonization reshapes the region in its own image with a new narrative in which indigenous Palestinians are irrelevant. Any resistance or claims of legitimacy on their part is criminalised. As a result, most Israelis have no understanding of Palestinian history and their claims to the land. Israel has normalized occupation in their eyes (and those of the international community). “We are peace-loving, we are normal,” they say, and so when Palestinians attack them, it is not resistance but criminal terrorism against a peaceful population…

… Our ICAHD group visited the Naqab, the desert and semidesert region in the south of Israel, to learn about Israel’s increased dispossession of the indigenous Bedouin. 

On our way we stopped at British Park, a regional park that the Jewish National Fund (JNF) built in the 1950s. British donors funded the park, hence its name.  The park lies on the lands of seven Palestinian villages that Israel ethnically cleansed in 1948, and today it is covered by forests of non-indigenous pine trees that the JNF planted partly to conceal the ruins of the villages.

The park is a perfect example of Israeli memoricide — the state’s deliberate erasure and destruction of anything Palestinian that disrupts the Israeli national narrative…

… Our study group visited a small Palestinian herding community near the village of Mukmas in Area C northeast of Jerusalem. Since October 7, it has come under increasing attack by Israeli settlers. 

At the community we met Rabbi Arik Ascherman, who cofounded ICAHD. A former director of Rabbis for Human Rights, Ascherman heads Torat Tzedek (Torah of Justice). For decades he has defended Palestinian human rights and provided a “protective presence” for vulnerable Palestinian communities.

When we arrived, Rabbi Ascherman was taking off his body armour. An hour earlier, settlers had attacked the community, and he had stood between them and the herders...